


Rehearsals

by yuletide_archivist



Category: The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-19
Updated: 2007-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:16:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1640948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for bardic raven</p>
    </blockquote>





	Rehearsals

**Author's Note:**

> Written for bardic raven

 

 

1.

At the age of eleven, Marguerite St Just had been caught stealing, the shopkeeper latching on to her wrist just as she was about to withdraw it from the bread-basket. That was the year before the _Comédie Française_ and she stammered badly, clinging still to the stolen bread-roll and flushed to her ears with guilt.

"I didn't - I mean -"

She was an unprepossessing sight that year, sulky mouth dominating her bony young face and straggles of greasy curls covering her eyes and her grimy cheeks - a year or two too young for the whorehouse but that was the most you could say. Still, the shopkeeper had a daughter of his own and no desire to see this one hanged. He pulled the bread-roll from the skinny, clutching fingers and nodded to the door. The child made a grateful, penitent, half-sobbing noise and fled.

When he looked up again, twenty minutes later, the bread was gone. So was a cake, his daughter's gloves, three pastries and two half-louis coins that had been left on the counter.

*

The year he turned thirteen, Percival Blakeney woke up abruptly at four in the morning, aware that his heart was hammering wildly, that he was sweating and panicky. Nightmare. He stared at the bright Spanish moonlight spangling the white-arched ceiling; in the next room, he could hear his mother muttering and muttering, the voice of her nurse a soothing drone over it. Then she screamed and there was a great rush of skirts and footsteps, and his father's voice shouting.

Some hours later, his door opened a crack. Nanny, with a flickering candle in one hand, around which the shadows seemed to cluster even thicker.

"Percy?" It was a whisper. He lay as still as he was able, until he felt her cool, rough hand brush his cheek, tracing the damp there; then he opened his eyes, aware that they were stinging humiliatingly, that he couldn't stop the hot tears from spilling and running sideways into his pillow. She kissed his forehead and sat with him for some time, her fingers brushing soothingly through his hair as he fought back one sob and then another, as quiet as he could. He could still hear his father's soft, exhausted voice murmuring soothingly to his mother in the next room.

"Now," Nanny said when he was calmer, rising with a rustle of petticoats and tucking him in firmly. "Hush and be a good boy for your father. Can you do that?"

He caught his breath, twice more, and then managed to hold his voice steady. "Yes."

2.

Marguerite St Just opened her salon in the Rue de Richelieu in the June of 1786, four days after her eighteenth birthday. Her brother brought several of his friends, all young men, a few liberal aristocrats and several skeptical and ambitious lawyers. The rest were admirers from her stage career, two of whom had been lovers and four who aspired to that status. There were no women present.

Marguerite, brilliant in rouge and powder, drew more laughs and admiring gazes than she had been accustomed to, even on stage. They sat in a little half-circle around her in the little room, lit by artfully placed candles that sent shadow shifting over the bright glitter of her eyes, the movement of her arms, and the perfectly drawn bow of her mouth; every speech, every gesture, drew a murmur of laughter, sometimes even a smattering of applause.

After they were gone, she collapsed into her favourite armchair and stared at her brother. He attempted a congratulatory smile that collapsed in the face of her weary, disappointed expression.

"Marguerite - are you not -" he said, haltingly, searching her face, and she rose impatiently, half-tripping over her masses of lace. She pushed her hands absently through her careful coiffure, disarranging it, her neat fingertips coming away white with powder. It was an old nervous habit of hers from the green room, after the show.

"They came for a performance, Armand," she said. "The same as ever. At least I was _paid_ on the stage." She rubbed her fingers together absently and then looked down at them more thoughtfully, brought one hand up to her cheek, then considered the layer of bright rose that lay over the white. "No more rouge."

*

That same June, Sir Percy Blakeney, at the age of twenty-four, found himself in skirts for the first time in his life. It was a dangerous and foolish lark and his heart hammered wildly in the tight constraint of the stays, caught between panic and laughter at the absurdly massive figure he must cut in the filthy narrow streets of London.

"Pardon me, Madam," and a respectable elderly gentleman edged around him, perfectly serious, with the resentfully gallant air of one confronted with a faintly disreputable but formidable matron. He bit down the laugh, aware that the fellows were still watching from behind a cart, half-collapsed in suppressed mirth. The game was won, this gentleman making the third person to take him for an unexceptionable - if large - female, but the victory seemed somehow tame and, on a whim, he turned to seize the gentleman's sleeve.

"Oh, sir," he said in a countrified accent, modulating his pitch with care. "I fear I have lost my way and -" But the gentleman's eyes were narrowing now with suspicion and Percy caught the precise moment his gaze flickered, passing from the jaw-line that the bonnet was arranged to disguise and soften to the arrangement of scarves and lace concealing his throat. Crimson spots appeared in his bony cheeks, above what Percy sinkingly perceived was a clergyman's cassock; and he raised his stick.

"You -" He was sputtering and Percy was almost minded to brave it out but that passers-by were beginning to pause curiously and that the gentleman seemed outraged beyond any common measure; with a hasty curtsey, his blood racing, he lifted the bulky skirts and petticoats above his knees and ran, mud splashing his stockings and the fellows pelting behind him with shouts of laughter.

That evening, safe in his own clothes again, he found himself before the mirror in his study, studying with peculiar intensity the shape of his own eyebrows and nose, the set of his mouth and the expression in his eyes. The man had been made suspicious by the voice but there had been something in Percy's face when their eyes had met that had confirmed him in his suspicion.

It didn't matter. It was only a bet, played out for a lark. He frowned and then smoothed it out again. The face in the mirror stared back at him, blank as a canvas.

3.

The first time he met her eyes, he had the same curious sense of looking into a mirror - there was the same blank of possibility in the oddly perfect planes and curves of her face, the serenely controlled mouth. She gave him her gloved fingertips to kiss. He bowed. When he looked up again, she was faintly smiling, startling blue eyes gazing directly into his; and then it was like the mirror had turned abruptly and shown him another face entirely.

"I -" he said in English, stumbling, voice too quick for Sir Percy Blakeney's famous drawl.

Her eyebrows lifted and he tried to gather himself and recall the manner he preserved for the French. Still, he heard his own voice speak too deep, too grave, "Mademoiselle St Just," and she dipped her head uncertainly in response, oddly ungraceful for a bare moment.

"Sir Percy."

 


End file.
